OK, I just heard back from James Gosling. He said "The quote is accurate, but incomplete and missing context." and he's working on a blog entry to clarify. I'll link to that from here once it is published.

> I don't know which languages you assume I favour when you> ask "Are you this critical of proponents of other> languages?", which "other languages"?"Languages other than our little red-headed friend Ruby," was what I was implying. But I don't have enough evidence even to hazard a guess, let alone make a claim, so consider it retracted. If you want to reply saying, "I don't hold any grudges against the Ruby community," then that would satisfy my curiosity, but don't consider this some sort of battle.

First, I think that James Gosling was more careful in what he was saying that people that flame him for what he said.

Second, There's something I have great difficulty to understand : basically what people are saying (not only in this thread, but generally speaking) is contradictory :- C# is moving on a virtuous way, Java begins to be bloated and difficult to use for beginners : not being specific, I don't know what's fundamentally better in C# compared to Java in this area. Beside, Java is designed from the ground up to be portable, not C# (even in the spec, or what is not in the spec, see Forms), even despite Mono- Java fails to remain simple in Web applications : First there is not only Web apps in the world, second I think it depends on what you whant to do, even in this area.- We hear that Java is slow compared with C / C++, and we hear that having decided to make Java a compiled language is a premature optimization (speed of Python, Ruby, PHP is really slow compared to Java even today, so it seems that this optimization is not -so- premature at the moment). Seems to me that we don't know what we whant.

Now if Java has failed, why it is now the prevalent language in Sourceforge, for example ?

> First, I think that James Gosling was more careful in what> he was saying that people that flame him for what he> said.

Yes, I agree.

Bruce Eckel's judgement was that "Gosling Didn’t Get The Memo" was "the best response" to the initial JDJ story. Let's take a quick look at it, and take it on face value as though Mr Gosling had said exactly what was reported in the initial JDJ story.

1) Ryan accuses James Gosling of using the term scripting language to denigrate PHP and Ruby by associating them with more limited language implementations like bash.

And then Ryan uses the term dynamic language to hype PHP and Ruby by associating them with more powerful language implementations like Lisp and Smalltalk.

PHP and Ruby implementations are not as limited as bash, nor are they as powerful as Lisp and Smalltalk implementations.

There's no reason to think James Gosling has any special knowledge about PHP and Ruby, apart from the obvious use of PHP and the buzz about Ruby on Rails.

But we should wonder why Ryan, supposedly someone with special knowledge, provides so many ‘generate web page’ examples (maybe PHP and Ruby really are used for an awful lot of ‘generate web page’ software).

And then when Ryan provides 5 favourable references on "Performance" - one is a 6 year old comparison of miniscule Python programs to Blackdown JDK 1.1.7, rather than a comparison of standalone PHP or Ruby with Java HotSpot 1.5.- one has PragDave eventually say "Clearly there’ll be times where you need to squeeze the most out of your CPU, where your application itself is the bottleneck and it’s CPU bound. In these cases, Ruby might be a bad choice."